Why this?

The occasional poem of my own and a generous helping of work by others that I find inspiring. Site is named for a beloved book by one of my favorite writers, Italo Calvino, whose fanciful work lights--and delights--my soul.

Monday, May 6, 2013

Spent

Late August morning I go out to cutspent and faded hydrangeas—washed greens, russets, troubled little auras of sky as if these were the very silks of Versailles, mottled by rain and ruinthen half-restored, after all this time…When I come back with my handful I realize I’ve accidentally locked the door,and can’t get back into the house.The dining room window’s easiest;crawl through beauty bush and spirea, push aside some errant maples, take down the wood-framed screen, hoist myself up. But how, exactly, to clamber across the sill and the radiator down to the tile?I try bending one leg in, but I don’t fold readily; I push myself up so that my waist rests against the sill, and lean forward, place my hands on the floor and begin to slide down into the room, which makes me think this was what it was like to be born: awkward, too big for the passageway…Negotiate, submit? When I give myselfto gravity there I am, inside, no harm,the dazzling splotchy flowerheadsscattered around me on the floor.Will leaving the world be the same—uncertainty as to how to proceed, some discomfort, and suddenly you’re —where? I am so involved with this idea I forget to unlock the door, so when I go to fetch the mail, I’m locked out again. Am I at home in this house, would I prefer to be out here, where I could be almost anyone? This time it’s simpler: the window-frame, the radiator, my descent. Born twice in one day! In their silvered jug,these bruise-blessed flowers: how hard I had to work to bring them into this room. When I say spent, I don’t mean they have no further coin.If there are lives to come, I thinkthey might be a littler easier than this one.--Mark Doty